More on alcoholism in rural Peru

Denise asks a good question--whether I witnessed more alcoholism in males in rural populations in Peru, as she suspects.

The answer is yes--or at least, people seem to be convinced that alcoholism is a more prevalent in the male part of the population. Although there does seem to be some alcoholism amongst females in some places. Not surprisingly, perhaps.

Two interesting things about this:

First, this seems to be a problem throughout Latin America, if not around the world. Alcoholism and alcohol abuse was a serious problem amongst the male sex in Guatemala as well. This is apparently one of the appeals of evangelical Christianity for women--they feel that evangelical men tend to make more reliable partners. Evangelicals here in South America expressed their frustration with the Catholic religion's tendency to demand (or encourage, perhaps) high expenditures at frequent festivals and celebrations, which made it difficult for the rural poor to break the cycles of poverty they've been bound to.

I think there was just an article in CPS that discussed the relationship between protestantism and democracy. Interesting. You can find it here.

I've got a copy of Weber in my backpack that I probably won't get to before the ISNIE conference in two weeks, but I will get to it eventually--it's been on top of my list for a long time. Weber's idea of the growth of the protestant work ethic as the key element in development seems to find some echoes nowadays in Latin America--especially up in Guate.

The other interesting thing about the male/female alcoholism gap is a story about former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo. First indigenous president in Latin America (although when you say that, it really seems to drive people batty. Apparently, for a lot of people, "Harvard Trained Economist" and "Native Guy" are not compatible. Whatever.)

Toledo is a moderate right-winger (as you would expect an economist coming from the age of the Washington Consensus to be), who was a big advocate of small government and, among other things, market-based solutions to poverty in Peru. He pushed a micro-credit program for women in Peru. At the time, one of the big concerns was that money lent to women might be taken to finance the purchase of alcohol or gambling and wasted. To combat this problem, women were given a whistle at the same time as their loan. The idea was that if a man came around to take their money, the woman could blow her whistle, and all the other women in the village could come running to chase him off.

According to Toledo, the system worked, though I've never heard a confirmation from a less biased source. Still, it's nice to think that a whistle is all that lies between the success and failure of such a program.

Alcoholism and Capital Accumulation

One of the problems that rural Peruvians face with regard to their personal or family economic development is an issue of the accumulation of capital. If they can't save money, it's hard for them to make the investments they need to start small businesses and to get ahead, economically.

One of the common solutions advanced for this is micro-credit. This often seems to be an effective solution, but fails to address what sometimes seems to be one of the root causes of this failure to accumulate capital, which is the over-consumption of alcohol, a really serious problem in rural Peru.

Although there may be some deeper, culturally-sensitive solution to this problem (which sometimes seems to be brought on by the tendency of Peruvian indigenous people on place a high value on communal festivals and feasts, often organized around the Catholic ecclesiastical calendar and older Andean religious traditions), government may play a strong role in promoting the accumulation of capital at a community level, through the levy of taxes and the re-investment of those taxes into infrastructure and the promotion of productive activities.

In short, I think what I'm suggesting is that, although private investment may be a more efficient solution, communitarian socialism may be an effective solution to the problems of poor communities and rural social malaise such as these problems of alcoholism.